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Friday, December 16, 2011

A horrible moment

Sometimes I think someone could write a sitcom using my life, and it would be really funny. But it doesn't feel funny at the moment.....

To get how horrible today was, you have to understand that I teach online, in a live classroom, in which I cannot see my students, and they cannot see me. But I can share my screen with them, and give them control of my cursor. Who would do that?

I would. And I was doing just that this afternoon with my students. I shared a geogebra file, and I gave cursor control to one student. He then inadvertently minimized my geogebra file, which revealed my twitter @mentions page, which was still there because I had checked it just before class. A couple of kids said haha miss you're on twitter, bad teacher! I didn't think anything of it, I just minimized that and got geogebra back, and we continued.Then class was over. I logged out of class, went back to twitter to see what they had seen for those few seconds.

You know how sometimes you get people following you and you immediately block them because they are clearly, um, not using twitter for the same reason you are? Well one of those people had, just moments before class started, sent me a message that was, in this person's words, "naughty and nice." I had immediately blocked that person, but that doesn't erase it from the display.....and that is what my students saw when geogebra got minimized.

Not exactly I Love Lucy, is it? This is what I looked like, I'm sure.

All I hope is that by the time Monday rolls around, I will be able to laugh at this. And be employed at the same time.

Isn't it a teachable moment? Kids land on sites they did not intend to encounter - what to do? And tell them why you were blocking the person who sent that message? Teach them about safe use of social media. And, yes - laugh. You, too are human!

Dianne, thanks for helping me put it into perspective! Susan, good point. It will be a teachable moment when I get back to that group on Monday. It occurred to me last night that they would be able to relate just by virtue of their own email accounts, which I'm sure get all kinds of similar messages.

Hi jfb57 - sorry to take so long to respond. When I read this, my first thought was to tell you that I think you can get email notification when you follow this blog, but I see that you have already done that. Thanks so much for following!Yes, it was perhaps one of the most awful moments of my career. I just hated the of how it made me look. Because, as I later told my students, I would prefer that they think I have stolen from an orphanage than that....as it turned out, they all said they didn't even see anything.I hope you had a good Christmas, and have a Happy New Year too!